DARPA insists that this is an internal program and one that is incapable of being applied across the Web. This assurance seems disingenuous as the Internet itself is a military creation. Moreover, systems such as Carnivore and ECHELON already have raised the hackles of privacy lovers for their stated capabilities, which extend well beyond federal or military surveillance targets.

According to David Bader, a principal investigator on the project who reported to FOX News:

Every time someone logs on or off, sends an email or text, touches a file or plugs in a USB key, these records are collected within the organization.

Bader explains in the interview below that their program ADAMS, which analyzes massive sets of data, is looking for officials who may be "breaking bad", but he claims that no spying is taking place:

The announcement of a search program to identify extreme thought within the government comes at an interesting time, as it was also announced today that the U.S. Military is now a prime target for home-grown terrorism.

Julian Sanchez, of the CATO Institute, writes that although this doesn't affect the public yet, "It would be a clear and quite outrageous invasion of privacy for such large-scale behavioral monitoring to be conducted on the residential or mobile broadband networks Americans rely on to provide their personal Internet connectivity—a fortiori if the goal is to share the results with the government without a court order."

Time and again, whether it is collecting babies' DNA and storing it in a secret database, or engaging in smartphone spying and GPS tracking, the U.S. government has proven that any promise of respecting privacy and civil liberties is mere lip service. If they can't even respect the privacy of their own federal employees -- and they view their own military with open suspicion of extremist behavior -- what can that possibly say for the rest of us?

Then there is the final question of how the voluminous data is interpreted. Even DHS security consultants like Anthony Howard seem to have reservations about the system's practicality:

'Since there is no real data publicly available to substantiate that any of this technology is preventing terrorist attacks or strengthening our borders from within, [we can't] really say definitively that this technology is doing any good,' he said.

So, that appears to be our choice: a further reduction in what little privacy we have left, or a complete and utter waste of taxpayer money during the most difficult economic conditions the country has ever seen. Perhaps, then, this is finally a DARPA project truly worth its name.

3 comments:

Here is a scary thought.....just try to imagine what DARPA and "our" government is NOT telling us what they are really doing with this kind of technology. Then multiply this imagination by, oh.....maybe 100 times and then you will be somewhat closer to the truth of it all. Do you really think "they" have to tell us the truth? Come on! Pitiful, all this wasted money in the millions just thrown away on so called defense.

9/11 Questions

Activist Post is an Independent News blog for Activists challenging the abuses of the establishment.

FAIR USE NOTICE. Many of the stories on this site contain copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making this material available in an effort to advance the understanding of environmental issues, human rights, economic and political democracy, and issues of social justice. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in Section 107 of the US Copyright Law which contains a list of the various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered fair, such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. If you wish to use such copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use'...you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

Paid advertising on Activist Post may not represent the views and opinions of this website and its contributors. No endorsement of products and services advertised is either expressed or implied.

All opinions expressed by contributors to this site are theirs and theirs alone.